Digital photography is becoming increasingly popular, and it is thus becoming more and more important for a user to be able to easily organize a large collection of digital photographs on a computer. There is a lack of usable structure provided by current organizational systems for digital photos, which use either labels or folders.
The foldering system of organization creates a many to one relationship between a picture and the folder it is stored in. Most digital pictures are automatically tagged with the date they were shot from the digital camera itself. So the chronological order is a natural order to organize the pictures. But, for example, if a picture is taken at the Statue of Liberty, New York, N.Y. and has John, Suzie and Jane in it, then putting it in a folder called John, Suzie, Statue or vacation will prevent it from being easily retrieved and require a full scan when trying to identify the pictures that are relevant.
The tagging system of organization overcomes the single box classification system but introduces a relatively large number of flat labels. This leads to a higher degree of freedom but increases the complexity of organization in the system. For example a tag, birthday party Fremont and a tag home Fremont, have overlapping metadata, and over time will make it harder for users to accurately retrieve the pictures. The tagging system puts undue onus on the user to organize the tags properly so that the pictures can be retrieved efficiently.
What is needed are methods, systems and computer readable media for organizing digital pictures in an efficient manner, such that a user can easily add metadata to pictures so that they can be retrieved efficiently.